You are here

Barthes's Life

15 January, 2016 - 09:14

Who does not feel how natural it is, in France, to be Catholic, married, and well qualified academically? 1 This sentence--found in the book Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, a collection of Roland Barthes's autobiographical essays--encapsulates his general cynicism about "the natural." This semi-ironic question might have originated from his own unique life; he was a Protestant in a predominantly Catholic nation, an unmarried homosexual, and a professor without a doctoral degree.

In 1948 he returned to the academic field. He held positions at the Institute Francais in Bucharest in 1948 and at the University of Alexandria in Egypt in 1949. There, he learned about structural linguistics from A.J. Gremas, a specialist in semantics, and had his linguistic initiation 2